3 win Nobel chemistry prize for world’s tiniest machines

Associated Press

Published 2:13 pm, Wednesday, October 5, 2016

STOCKHOLM — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing the world’s smallest machines, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair but with the potential to revolutionize computer and energy systems.

Machines at the molecular level have taken chemistry to a new dimension and “will most likely be used in the development of things such as new materials, sensors and energy storage systems,” the academy said.

Practical applications are still far away — the academy said molecular motors are at the same stage that electrical motors were in the first half of the 19th century — but the potential is huge.

Stoddart, 74, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., has already developed a molecule-based computer chip with 20 kB memory. Researchers believe chips so small may revolutionize computer technology the way silicon-based transistors once did.

Feringa, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, leads a research group that in 2011 built a “nanocar,” a minuscule vehicle with four molecular motors as wheels.

Feringa said he could think of all kinds of potential applications, including “tiny robots that the doctors in the future will inject in your blood veins and then go to search for a cancer cell or ... deliver a drug.”